resilience
Generally, human beings do not set out in the world to learn resilience, they don’t often go in search of the journey required to become fast at bouncing back, they don’t seek out and long for failures and feelings of despair just so they can cultivate their response and strength.
Resilience is something that gets built — that grows in us and is forged by fire — out of no other option.
We gain it when we don’t necessarily want to, when we would rather have just had things go our way, would rather have not been required to live through the pain and challenge.
Resilience is earned through the living of life — really living — and experiencing every high and every pit fall.
It is earned through the process of learning you can feel the agonizing feelings and withstand them and then persist; not that at some point you will no longer ever feel this way, necessarily; not that it will ever get easier, necessarily; but that you will grow to bear it, accept it, and move through it to thrive faster than ever before.
Resilience is born when your options are either crumble and fall or rise and keep going.
Resilience is never, ever something you can just learn from a book, or think really hard about when you’re at peace, and then *poof* you have it! You ARE it! Hello, resilience!
Resilience is hard won.
It’s a great concept, in theory; of course we all want to be pliable and responsive, hopeful and courageous, able to persevere without despairing.
But few want to put it into practice to the effect of actually failing, losing something you care about, trying and watching it not work out, feeling crushing disappointment come down on you…
Yet this is when resilience grows.
When you could dwindle, perish, hide, and give up…
Or you could take just one more step, try this other idea, choose to find a sliver of light, have the daring determination to not cease…
When those are your two options…
And you choose the latter…
Your resilience grows, even if just by a strand, each time.
We want to be resilient, sure.
Are we willing to stand tall and lean in when everything feels terrible so we can actually embody the possibilities and strength and hope for the future?
Sometimes there is no other option.
Sometimes you just HAVE to keep going, even when you don’t know where, you can’t see the map, the destination is far out of vision, and it’s all a mystery for now.
You can take the next step. That’s it. That’s all you ever have to do. That’s all you ever have to know.
Sometimes you have no other choice, like everyone else sometimes has no other choice, and when the choices are only to give up or to persevere, it’s a clear choice.
We keep going.
Resilience awakens.
